Back

All right, so I've been absent. It took every last bit of energy I had to make it through "brain and behavior". I made it through and now it's on to "circulation, respiration, and regulation," which is a fancy way of saying "heart, lungs, kidneys". Somehow cardiology appeals to me in a way that neurology didn't--I'm really sure why, but I think it might be because it's more directly related to running.

A big part of this block is going to be preventative medicine, especially in preventing obesity and diabetes. Every time they teach us about nutrition stuff the little hippy inside my head gets all riled up and starts noticing things like how unnatural Snickers and Coke are: "man, the government wants you to eat that stuff to lull you into believing that it's actually real food." It's a good thing that I don't own my own house and won't be in charge of purchasing Halloween candy this year--for reasons both philosophical and financial I might end up handing out half-of-a-half-of-a graham cracker to each trick-or-treater.

But, in reality, the timing for Healthy Dave isn't too bad--there are hundreds of tomatoes, peaches, and honey-crisp apples here at the parents' house (I'll never leave) to keep me happy.

Sorry for the long absence. Here's hoping that this block of school treats me better than the last!

Have you ever wondered what it would feel like to jump onto a moving train? I've never done it either but I think I have a pretty good idea of what it would be like.

On an unrelated note I started my second year of medical school yesterday.

Mt. Aire

In my new lab we are all required to use the same notebooks. Here I've snapped a photo and highlighted my favorite part:
In case you can't read it, it says: "USE YOUR IMAGINATION". Which apparently is a trademarked phrase. I'm all for it, I think it's a great slogan, but then I open the thing up and it looks like this:
...and my imagination takes me right back to undergraduate chemistry lab. In case you didn't take chemistry in college and you don't know what it's like, picture a really old building (but not the cool kind of old) with large yellow stains all over the linoleum floors that look like they've been there since the dawn of time. It smells a like a mixture of acetone (fingernail polish remover, I think) and mold, and everything you touch is sticky. You get paired up with someone who doesn't speak English and spends most of the two-hour purgatory texting. You trudge through the protocol--it feels like trying to stay awake at 6:00 am after an all-nighter. In the end you're evaporating or weighing something when your partner awakens from his/her cell phone trance just long enough to spill your project all over the crusty floor, which miraculously manages to absorb the spilled liquid. You call over the slightly bilingual TA (who always manages to find some way of taking points off your assignments) who says, "you must repeat." Isn't using your imagination fun?

Here are some pictures from running dry creek (see previous post). Taken on my phone.


Isn't that an inviting trail? Then, on my way down I ran into this friend:I was going fast enough that I couldn't stop by the time I saw him so I went right over the top. He almost scared me to death, just cooking in the middle of the trail.

Interpreting

This week I've started doing some interpreting at the hospital. It had been a little over a year since I last interpreted and I realized how much Spanish I had forgotten. I had also forgotten how fun some of the people I meet up there are. I was sitting with one patient in the waiting room when she told me this story:

"I have a 7-year-old daughter who won't take pills. Last year she had a terrible fever. We took her to the doctor and he gave her a prescription that she absolutely refused to take. So we went back to the pharmacy and got it in a suppository. It kind of freaked her out when we gave it to her. Then, later that week when she didn't want to eat her dinner I told her that if she didn't eat we'd have to give it to her the same way as the meds. She's never been a picky eater since."

Dry Creek

Dry Creek might be the best place to run in the entire world even though it's not currently very dry. Starting at the JCC you climb and climb until you come out on the shoreline trail with a view of the entire valley from the Great Salt Lake to Mount Olympus. I run it at least once a week.

A couple of days ago I took my older sister up there (she lives in Wisconsin but she didn't let the altitude slow her down at all--tough as nails). As were on our way back down she asked me if I was training for anything. "This," I said.